Writing to a friend on December 21, 1916, Edith Wharton made
some telling remarks about the “shortish novel” on which she was
working. Designating it “as the Hot Ethan”, she explains that it is
set “in the neighbourhood of Windsor Mountain”, with “the time
being summer which is also the title of the book”, and she adds, “I
don’t know how on earth the thing got itself written in the
scramble & scuffle of my present life: but it did”
(Letters 385). As in the earlier Ethan Frome of 1911,
Wharton in Summer turns again to the New England countryside
of her Massachusetts home, The Mount, to examine the strained and
barren lives of both its small t…

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